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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.

Paul Farmer

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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Graveyard
Haiti
Projects
Development
Talk
People

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.
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The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.
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I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
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I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.
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God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is.
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The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money
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It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.
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Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.
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The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
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lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.
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Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.
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I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
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We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
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Equity is the only acceptable goal
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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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